ROSEMARY Theobalds, a member of St Mary’s RC Church, comments on John 14 v20-29:

IT happens at funerals: different people reflect on a person’s life and a picture of that person emerges so we begin to appreciate the underlying meaning of this one amazing, but ‘ordinary’ life.

The writer of the Gospel of John was doing something like this.

He had had about 60 years to reflect with the early Christian community on the meaning of Jesus’s life, death and resurrection to new life, and this makes John’s Gospel different from those of Matthew, Mark, and Luke which were written two or three decades earlier.

These give us accounts of Jesus’s birth, his teachings, his parables, his healings and miracles, and his crucifixion, but they do not attempt to give us its meaning.

This weekend’s passage is from Chapter 14, and it would be good to read the whole chapter, indeed the whole gospel.

But it is the promise of peace that jumps out at us. We live at a time when mindfulness is taught as an effective way to reduce stress and gaining control of life.

It is popular because it does not present itself as a ‘religion’, which many people are wary of.

But the words of Jesus have a captivating quality to them – “ Peace I give to you, my own peace I give you, a peace the world cannot give, this is my gift to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid.”

He invites us to live from the same source as he lives from: God, or the ‘light within’ as the Quakers say. Then we will have peace, and much else besides.